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Climate Change, In Song!

Climate Change is a daunting phenomena, a severe problem that is threatening our planet but which remains inaccessible and invisible for many people. Part of the problem is condensing all the facts, figures and studies into a coherent, easy-to-understand form that people can see and understand. Not the easiest thing to do, and even the famous hockey-stick shaped graphs appear to be falling short.

Luckily, artists like cellist Daniel Crawford are stepping in to fill the role of scientific interpreter. Committing the most alarming portion of that hockey stick to music, he shows just how alarming this trend is. He calls it “A Song of Our Warming Planet”, where notes are matched to temperatures, one for each year since 1880.

As the average global temperature increases by 0.8 Celsius (1.4 Fahrenheit) and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increase by more than 40%, the song climbs from the low, open C to the high end of its register, sounding, in one commenter’s estimation, “like a woman screaming.” And the video ends with the chilling text:

Scientists predict the planet will warm by another 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. This additional warming would produce a series of notes beyond the range of human hearing.

Scary stuff. Check out the video below, and then be sure to look around this site for some of the more positive news on the issue. I don’t like sending people away gloomy!

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14 thoughts on “Climate Change, In Song!”

I’m so enamored with the sound of the cello, but this post leaves me so sad. But I often wonder if this is true by how mild our seasons seem to be in Michigan. Our winters no longer produce the storms the did I remember when I was a child and the summers are not nearly as sweltering as they were when I was young. I remember when I was pregnant with my son some 20 years ago that I spent most of my time in our pool. The heat was unbearable and our lawn died. This August our lawn is lush and the temperature is in the 70’s. What do you think my friend?

Well, one of the symptoms is weather patterns that are unpredictable. I lived in Ottawa as a kid, where the winters were cold and the summers hot. Over the years, the winters vacillated between sleet, snow, hale, and icy rains, and the summers were freakishly hot. Winter and summer would also take forever to get gone!

That’s the way it was here in Michigan too. Not anymore though. I miss the days of humidity in the summer when the sweat would drip down your back. I long for the time when you would go to the movies in the middle of the day to escape the hottest part of the day and grab a little bit of fantasy.

What about bundling up and having a bonfire outside in the middle of winter, or ice skating and hot cocoa?

Well, dwindling resources are a consequence of climate change. Except for the oil, that running out will be the greatest bit of luck we could ask for! As for overpopulation… yeah, that’s a big, sticky one. Not sure how we’re going to deal with that one.

No, that was the manga Death Note, which was about a book that had the ability to kill anyone whose name was written in the book. It’s been made into an anime and two movies with a spin-off. And there’s an American remake in the works.

Interesting… we might need something similar, such as a lottery system. But of course, I recall telling you we could address this with better urban planning, food production, and clean energy. But that’s really mitigating the impact of all the people. It doesn’t really address the population growth. The real solution is about bringing development to the developing world, in a way that helps them skip over that messy industrial phase. I got an article on that pending…